Dead Space: Numbers
by Eu Tyto Alba
Summary: (Inspired by a change I'd have made to the series cannon: instead of a religion, Unitology should've been numerology.) The crew and passengers of the Ivory Star interstellar cruise ship Scheherazade begin experiencing widespread mental collapse en-rout to destination Methuselah. One afflicted young man, however, develops a singular version of the symptoms that keeps him...together.
1. Prologue & Chapter I

_**Author's Explanation:**_

 _I recently beat the "Dead Space" trilogy, and as is becoming customary for me, started a canon-altering fanfic instead of writing a traditional blog review. Because IMO movie & game reviews are usually just whiny and non-productive..._

 _My big idea was that: instead of a religion, Unitology SHOULD have been a branch of NUMEROLOGY, and the Unitologists, instead of oversimplified religious zealots, SHOULD have been paranoid schizophrenics like the main character in Jim Carry's Horror stint,_ _"The Number 23"_ _. Sanctifying the Markers to create unreachable suicidal fanatics, as is the "Dead Space" canon, wasn't necessary. (As I aim to demonstrate below.) To the video-games' detriment, it felt totally forced, like a manufactured Aesop, quoted out of context, and beaten into our heads like an annoying war drum! (Even if DS's developers were really just copying H. P. Lovecraft's "Call of the Cthulhu".) I mean, wouldn't it be nice if the villains of the Dead Space universe were actually complicated, so that they could actually challenge the hero properly instead of just getting lucky that they have SO MANY 'like-mindless' friends?! Aren't heroes measured by the greatness of their enemies; what is the measure of Sherlock Holmes without James Moriarty?! Or, just take a look at One-Punch Man!_ _  
_

 _BTW, I'm also drawing inspiration from "Master & Commander: Far Side of the World"  
and "Titanic: Secrets of the Fateful Voyage"...just because... ...they're pretty... :-3  
_

 _BTW, long after writing two and a half chapters of this fanfic, it came to my attention that H. P. Lovecraft (the 'Granddaddy of 20th-Century Horror Literature' himself!) wrote a short piece that IMO has many points in common, called "The Music of Erich Zann". I heard that it was one of his personal favorites, and so like to take that to mean he probably would have liked this, too... (^_^) ...Wouldn't it be nice if I ever FINISHED it?! :-/  
_

 _._

* * *

 **"DEAD SPACE: NUM63R5"**

 **Prologue + Chapter I**

* * *

The Markers are a virus, a memetic one rather than genetic. Like Theo Jensen's Strand Beasts, it infects peoples' minds rather than their bodies and forces them to serve it, to replicate it, and distribute it across the galaxy, to perpetuate its conquest. Only afterwards do the Markers claim the bodies of their servants as materials for a new race of soulless super-beings... While some few people worship the Markers of their own freewill and desire everlasting unity with the super-beings, more often people are subtly ensnared by them and slowly descend into psychological slavery. Impassive, rational people suggest that the Marker's physical form resembles a segment of DNA; its worshippers say the Marker resembles an Infinity sign, an Ouroboros; and yet, those who discover it their unwitting master say it resembles the headless figure of woman _—_ that is to say, a succubus. At first, they say, she seemed a bearer of light, gracing mankind with intelligence far beyond what comes naturally by means of the pulsating EM signal it transmits. By the time those poor slaves see what she has made them wrought, there's no escape for them anymore, not even in death. All that many of them have left is the intellectual bliss of solving the Marker's equations, which even then, helpless to defy it, they know is a lie.

* * *

The crew of the Ivory Star interstellar cruise ship Scheherazade begin experiencing widespread mental collapse en-rout to destination Methuselah. It caught on like the flu: clinical paranoia coupled with _—_ to such a degree that it seemed terrifyingly artificial _—_ heightened intellect. A few at a time, little by little, people stopped eating, sleeping, and generally taking care of themselves, then withdrew from society, and even hid away in order to avoid their duties. The longer anyone went without being found and rescued from their self-confinement, the worse the condition they were found in; many, just barely alive as though they had been imprisoned and abandoned by their captors, yet without physical restraints of any kind. Wherever such people were discovered was usually snowed in with paper, like rats nests, every last sheet of it covered in disjointed mathematical formulas and calculations. Even, in the worst cases, the writing flowed onto the walls. None of which, upon review by the still-sound-minded, seemed to have any meaning, except for haunting, striking similarities in the content between multiple isolated cases.

Dr. Brunhilde Swanson, an MD and one of the acting-psychiatrists on board the Scheherazade, determines to get to the bottom of this, and assumes the roll of detective as well. Her theory is that...well, she realizes, it would sound crazy for her to say it out loud.

On the other hand, Marlow Valentine, a student dishwasher, has fewer inhibitions about speaking his mind, and casually strikes up involved discussions with anyone he bumps into. Most of these conversations, as Marlow's supervisor, Uriel Gonzales, who often overhears them, realizes, sound increasingly like Mensa material. Furthermore, as he points out to Marlow, three of the people whom Marlow has talked to (people most other folks would have been intimidated witless by: lauded professors of Haptic Cybernetics, Subquantum Cosmology, & Radio-Pleomorphic-Resonance Bioengineering, respectively) recently ended up on the short list of the most extreme paranoids. Perhaps, Uriel suggests, Marlow should have his head examined preemptively. Marlow, who was naturally slightly nerdy anyway, concurs that lately he seemed to have been strangely outdoing himself, and says he'll consider it.

"Why?" he wonders later, once alone in his tiny quarters. "Why should I go? If they find something wrong, they'll want to fix it. Maybe," Marlow rationalizes, grasping for excuses, "the cure could be worse than the curse. Maybe..." The truth is he was already aware that something was beginning to take hold of him _—_ something exhilarating, terrifying yet positive. "Maybe, I'm better off this way. Maybe we all are; since when did intelligence become a disease, anyway?" At the same moment, however, Marlow wonders if acceptance couldn't be a strange function of one; such a disease could take its victims down without a fight. Sure, that was all well and good to recognize in theory; but once enlightened, one grows fond of being enlightened, like one who was born blind and then cured late in life grows fond of being able to see. Until what stage of his ruin, Marlow debates with himself, would this gift still seem worth holding onto, supposing a shrink actually could put him back to normal and he has to face a choice? Marlow supposes that, whether he means to or not, he will just wait and find out the hard way how far he's willing to fall. "Should I be worried that I'm okay with that?" were his last thoughts of protest.

One night, according to the time, for out in Space it is always night, after dinner, Marlow Valentine can't help himself but swipe an ionophonic (plasma-electric) viola that someone had left behind in the Dining Hall. Until now, he had never known that an impulse of curiosity could be so powerful, outweighing even such profound guilt as he was left with; he'd never stolen anything in his life, let alone anything possibly so valuable as a professional's instrument. But nowadays, Marlow found himself becoming more and more confused, as if here and there pieces of his mind were falling out and his self-awareness was starting to resemble a Jenga tower mid game. Marlow had been hearing music in his sleep; he HAD to learn to play something with which to express it, or else he WOULD go mad.

When he returned to his quarters with the instrument, however, Marlow noticed for the first time that its walls were already covered in the strange script known only to the paranoids. For a moment, he wondered what the script meant, and how he had written it if he hadn't known what it meant. Then, as if his mind were a set of eyes and they were adjusting to a dark room, gradually Marlow became able to read the symbols again, and remembered they were his formulas. The formulas he was working on for his music! A deep feeling that all would be well swept over him, empowering him, until he lifted the instrument to his chin and did a splendid impression of Jack Benny. Thunderstruck by its difficulty, he almost rage-quit and smashed the viola on his night table, only halted by a sudden funny feeling that he held is own life in his hand. "Dammit," his better nature squirmed in defeat; he couldn't possibly return it to its rightful owner now _—_ ever. It would seem like cutting off his right hand, lame though it was. An ephemeral thought occurred to Marlow that a career musician, such as he had stolen the viola from, would probably feel similarly about it. That night, he slept cuddling the viola and its bow like a teddy bear.

When he awoke, he discovered that it too was now inscribed over every square inch with unrecognisable formulas. Someone was banging impatiently on his cabin door. He had overslept, he saw, by hours; no, wait, his chronometer had stopped. "Strange." He got dressed and went out. The first person he encountered froze in her tracks at the sight of him and dropped some glass lab equipment she had been carrying. She hardly took notice of the glass breaking over her stockinged feet; Marlow noticed the tremor of fear she tried to disguise in her voice as she asked if HE was okay. "Your face... Your arms," she indicated. Somehow, he hadn't noticed there were equations scratched into his skin, just like he (he guessed it was he) had inscribed on the viola. "Security," she whispered into the collar of her lab coat. Marlow spun on his heel and booked it back to his cabin, where he changed into a long-sleeved shirt, brushed his hair over his face, and madly tried to wipe the walls clean of evidence. The only thing he managed to do successfully was hide the viola in his cabin's tiny air vent before his door crashed inward.


	2. Chapter II

**"DEAD SPACE: NUM63R5"**

 **Chapter II**

* * *

It all began on Aegis VII, after Isaac Clarke destroyed the first Red Marker but before the Ishimura was salvaged. A small private ship passing by Aegis VII spotted the derelict mining pit from space _—_ obviously the work of a planet-cracker, but with the planet-cracker nowhere in sight. Or any other ship, for that matter. If the materials necessary for sustaining human life were considered scarce across all of human society, then how much more the materials of luxury were, such as precious metals and gemstones, especially varieties not geologically feasible on Earth. Word of the unguarded pit spread throughout the social underworld, and black-market scavengers as well as thrill-seeking treasure hunters raided the surface of the Aegis VII mining crater long before EarthGov's clean-up crew arrived. In response, after their arrival and discovery of the raid, EarthGov hunted down and killed most of the scavengers to contain the bloody secrets of what they had seen planet-side. But, by then, most of the looted wares, including dozens of fragments and THOUSANDS of pea-sized granules of the Red Marker, had already been sold-off and scattered to the six Euclidean winds of the Universe.

The fragments and granules, too small to absorb the energy waves radiating from Tau Volantis, ran out of energy like dying embers and became almost indistinguishable from any normal stone. Often, they were mistaken for and marketed through backdoor suppliers as red Tiger's Eye. Once minimally skillful gem cutters had hewn and polished the Marker shards and set them in jewelry, that's exactly what they looked like. It was during the Scheherazade's stay at Port Circe, one of the half-dozen ritzy tourist traps between Earth Space and the Messier 4 star cluster, that a young man unwittingly bought one of these fragments, fashioned into a pendant, for his young wife as a souvenir of their honeymoon.

Unfortunately, the fragment slowly awoke when it absorbed energy from another source: Serenity's heartbeat, emulating infrared, sound, and jolts of electricity mere inches away from it, in a pattern that the Marker understood _—_ one indicative of humanity. In love though she was, her heart still didn't give off enough energy to enable the silver-dollar-sized Marker pendant to do much. There was really only one thing it could do... Increment by increment, Serenity became severely agoraphobic. She fled from any deck of the ship which had windows, and even wept in fear when her husband pleaded with her to observe a passing comet with him. After twice having been found hiding in a wardrobe and once tightly wedged under the couple's honeymoon bed, one night, she quietly disappeared from their shuttered luxury suit, and never returned.

* * *

(QTE!) "It's you!" said a stunned security officer, lowering the aim of his taser rifle as two others rushed into Marlow's quarters ahead of him. "What happened to you, man?" he asked with almost fatherly, yet clearly freaked-out, concern. Inside, there stood Marlow: his white shirt on backwards, its sleeves now covered in smeared ink, Marlow's long black hair tangled in a mass like a lion's mane, and his marked-up skin practically camouflaging into the room's marked-up walls. After a moment, the youth recognized the officer from a chance meeting by the pool during one of Marlow's days off. He tried to back against the wall _—_ and look as innocent as possible _—_ but the two officers who had barged in first were on him too quick, forcing his head down and restraining his hands behind his back. "You're not under arrest," one of them said in a calm tone, "We are escorting you to Medical Deck." "Look, I know what you're thinking, but I'm fine! Or else we we wouldn't even be having this conversation," Marlow argued, struggling against his bonds only a little. Only a crazy many would try to escape by force, right? Though, he knew, with a twinge deep in his gut like the solemn ring of a bell, the jig was up. "Who's having a conversation?" the officer who'd bound Marlow's hands answered, guiding him out with a stiff grip on his upper arm. "Save it for the Doc," added the other jovially, holstering his own taser. Evidently, the officers were relieved that this capture was easy, let alone, possibly they were thinking, bloodless. "Very funny," Marlow winced. _  
_

On Medical Deck, Marlow was deposited in a transparent quarantine chamber. Since he'd been cooperative, the security men removed his handcuffs. One of the doctors as well as a nurse attendant had been paged ahead of time and were patiently waiting for Marlow, but the youth could feel the curious glances at him from all the other Medical staff who were supposed to be minding their own business. Sitting across from him in the sterile-white quarantine room was his own reflection in the bullet-proof glass; Marlow realized he couldn't exactly blame them. Above all else, the whites of his eyes shone out from under his black hair with a wild gleam; deep, dark circles under his eyes said he hadn't slept in weeks, but the gleam said that that was because he hadn't had to. From out of Marlow's reflection, the doctor approached. "Seen better days, have we?"

"I'll say," Marlow shrugged. He couldn't make up his mind whether or not he needed to be here. He couldn't remember writing on his skin, or his walls, or the viola; for all he could be certain, someone else had broken into his quarters and set him up. Maybe he'd said something that pissed someone off, like one of those celebrity professors...

"Can you tell me your name?" asked the middle-aged man in white.

"Marlow Valentine," mumbled the youth, who averted his eyes to hide his electric gaze.

The doctor headered his holopad with the info. "And can you tell me why you are here?" His tone was gently condescending, like that of someone speaking to a small child. Marlow didn't like where this was going.

"I dunno. I guess because I cut myself shaving."

The doctor smirked without answering as he typed more notes on the holopad's touch-screen. He finished, and drag-dropped Marlow's patient file onto another holo-screen mounted on the outside frame of the quarantine room's door. "You should consider yourself lucky that they found you so early, Mr. Valentine. The scans show you are still in good physical health."

 _'Wait, when was I scanned?'_ Marlow wondered to himself, looking the interior of the room over for concealed sensor bars _—_ without finding any.

"However, look here," continued the doctor. Marlow's reflection suddenly flared blue as a two-dimentional hologram filled the glass pane in front of him, showing Marlow a large rotating image of, what was apparently, his brain. Here and there, white, yellow, and orange sparks flittered between neurons like swarms of butterflies to illustrate activity. "This," explained the man in white, "is a normal brain." Marlow raised an eyebrow; so, that means it's NOT his, then? "The colored lights indicate the electrical impulses in our brains at the varying levels of consciousness. The white lights represent conscious thoughts and voluntary motor functions, the yellow lights represent involuntary motor functions, and the orange represent primitive, unconscious impulses, or in other words, thoughts that have not fully formed into thoughts yet. You might have heard of it as called a subconscious. Now this..." the man elaborated, flicking another icon on his hollopad. The big blue brain on the display in front of Marlow suddenly ignited throughout with red sparks, turning the whole pristine quarantine room red along with it. "...is your brain." Marlow folded his hands in front of his face to hide his reaction. He wasn't even sure what his reaction was. Surprise? Fear? NOT being surprised? Maybe, embarrassment? His mind was his personal business, and having its supposed-flaws pictured up there like that where all of these learned men and women could see it felt not a little like being photographed with his trousers down. (Maybe, it was actually himself that he wanted it hidden from; he still didn't want to face what he'd been allowing to escalate; he didn't want to believe there could possibly be anything wrong.) "The red sparks illustrate a whole new level entirely. We don't know what it is, other than it's deeper and even more primitive than the human subconscious, yet seems to augment all of our other cognitive abilities, extraordinarily."

The doctor's final point stood out for its positive implication. "So, if all it does is make people smarter, stronger, faster, better, or whatever, why is it a problem?" Marlow questioned, still avoiding eye-contact.

"Because, Mr. Valentine..." began the doctor, and activated some different function on his holopad. Marlow watched as the blue brain on the large display filled out with red light, like a clear balloon being pumped full of crimson Koolaid. "This is a prediction of what your brain will look like in three weeks time. Whatever has altered your brain's activity will eventually consume your brain entirely, at which point you'll either become a vegetable, or entirely loose control of yourself." The doctor rubbed his forehead, revealing the stress he was under. "This condition is unprecedented, therefore none of us here can say which. In either case, even involuntary control of your vital organs will fail, and will have to be artificially sustained in order to keep you alive. Twelve people, similarly afflicted, the ones whom this model was based on, are already being kept in deep stasis until we can return to Earth."

Marlow's jaw dropped. He was speechless. The doc seemed to read his mind, and rubbed his brow again. "Aside from putting you into stasis now, there's nothing we can do." He flicked his holopad once more, and the ill-omened crimson illusion on the bullet-proof glass flickered off. The spotless walls of the quarantine chamber shone white as a summer cloud again, as if—they seemed to Marlow—covering for a lie. "However, since you still seem to have most of your marbles," the man in white raised one heavy, scrutinizing eyebrow, obviously reconsidering those words due to Marlow's self-mutilation, "maybe you can help us. ...Maybe, you can even help us help you."

* * *

 _ **Author's Note:** Yes, that was a Quick Time Event! And yes, if this was an actual "Dead Space" game instead of just a fanfiction, you were supposed to NOT mash the button. ;) I know FanFictionNet doesn't allow "choose-your-own-adventure" stories_ _ _—_ so lets just say HYPOTHETICALLY that, if you, the player (reader) HAD mashed the button, Marlow would have fought the security officers, injured two of them, and gotten tased in the back by the one he was acquainted with as he ran down the long hallway. Mash the button again, and Marlow would actually get back up and keep running (or fail to, and he'd just lie there and be apprehended). Mash it again as Marlow approaches a janitorial cart, and he'd dive-roll over the top of it (or fail to, and crash into it, and be apprehended). Mash the button one last time as he approaches a rolling brass garment rack, and he'd slide under it (or trip on it, getting apprehended). You can clear all the obstacles, but at the end, Marlow still gets hit with a tranquilizer as he runs down another long hallway. Either way, the story would continue, but in consequence, Marlow would wake up in the quarantine chamber wearing a strait-jacket and only get a Medium Med Pack instead of a... [OMG SPOILER] ...lol oops, that was close. ;)  
_


End file.
